While the United Nations did not adopt 8 March as ‘International Women’s Day’ until 1975, and during the Menzies era the date was generally associated with socialist groups and even controversial speakers from the USSR, Robert Menzies was an early advocate for women’s equality and the central role of women in Australian democracy. Indeed, he stated that true democracy had only begun in his lifetime with the enfranchisement of women, which occurred federally in 1902 and in Victoria in 1908. Menzies would break new ground for women’s participation in Australian politics with the appointment of Dame Enid Lyons as the first female Cabinet member in 1949 – and that was after he had already actively campaigned for her to become the first woman elected to federal parliament in 1943 by giving speeches in her Tasmanian electorate.

During the Second World War, Menzies witnessed firsthand women’s entry on mass into the workplace, both in Australia and Britain, and he was mightily impressed by what they were able to achieve. In a national radio broadcast delivered in 1942, Menzies posed the question: ‘In the long run, will our community not be a stronger, better balanced and more intelligent community when the last artificial disabilities imposed upon women by centuries of custom have been removed?’

Later that same year he declared that ‘higher education for women must come to be regarded as normal’, and in 1943 he would reiterate that: ‘Of course women are at least the equals of men. Of course there is no reason why a qualified woman should not sit in Parliament or on the Bench or in a professorial Chair, or preach from the Pulpit or, if you like, command an Army in the field. No educated man today denies a place or a career to a woman because she is a woman.’

Women were central to the founding of the Liberal Party, most notably Elizabeth Couchman, President of the Australian Women’s National League, whom Menzies had a strong and highly productive relationship with. It was because of Couchman that women were guaranteed equal representation in the Liberal’s extra-parliamentary organisation, in what was then a significant innovation in how political parties operated. When Menzies closed the famous Albury Conference in 1944, he said that:

‘Men and women will side by side be members of this organisation. I would like to express the hope on the part of the men represented here that as a result of this joint and equal membership of this great movement we will find on councils and executive an adequate representation of women. Women are unquestionably destined to exercise more and more influence on practical politics in Australia. There was a time when they were thought to stand aside, exercise only a passive influence. That has gone. In the educating of the electorate in liberal ideas they have for many years been an effective force. Now we have an organisation in which all distinctions have gone, and with men and women working equally for one body the resultant education value of our movement is going to be greatly increased’.

The early federal platform of Menzies’s new party included such points as:

• equality of opportunity, liberties and status for men and women; and equal freedom to engage in all civic and political activities in the community;

• the elimination of anomalies in employment opportunities for women, and the institution of further enquiries into the principles of assessing women’s wage rates with a view to the correction of existing injustices;

• uniformity of marriage and divorce laws within the Commonwealth;

• the appointment of women to committees, commissions or similar bodies concerned with the status and rights of women, housing policy, and the care and education of children and like matters;

• every practical assistance towards ensuring the provision of all modern and progressive domestic amenities for women, particularly in country areas.

Early in the Liberal Party’s life, it preselected Annabel Rankin for its 1946 Senate ticket, thus ensuring that she became the first female Queenslander to enter Parliament. In 1951 she would become the first woman to serve as a parliamentary whip in any Westminster Parliament.

Menzies’s Liberal Party made a deliberate pitch to female voters in innovative ways. Though coloured by the context of the time, his ‘Forgotten People’ broadcast and its appeal to the home placed women in a central place in Australian political life, whereas Labor’s emphasis on the industrial workplace tended to exclude them. Menzies’s promise to extend Child Endowment, which he took to both the 1946 and 1949 elections, was arguably one of the first times that an election policy had been specifically aimed at women – and it was backed by highly targeted advertising. Shortly after returning as prime minister, Menzies said that the women’s vote had ‘tipped the scale’ in the election.

The Menzies Government had first introduced the Child Endowment payment in 1941, and it is worth noting that it made a significant contribution to female independence. This was because it was paid directly to the mother rather than the traditional male head of the household (and there were some significant conservative criticisms of this fact at the time), and it was also paid to single mothers who were often subject to discrimination and taboo.

In 1959 it was the Menzies Government which introduced the first form of ‘no fault’ divorce to cover all of Australia, thus ensuring women had a greater ability to get out of toxic relationships. In 1962, the Women’s Bureau was created in the Department of Labour and National Service to investigate policy in relation to women in the paid workforce. While the concept of setting wages according to the assumption of a male breadwinner endured throughout the Menzies era, the premise was gradually undermined by child endowment which meant that wages did not have to be designed around a male supporting a family.
On the public stage, it is also worth noting Menzies’s deep admiration for Queen Elizabeth II, which was based not just on his constitutional regard for the monarchy, but how she carried herself as a person. In this manner, the public figure whom Menzies arguably respected the most was a woman.

Finally, the unsung hero of the Menzies era was his wife Dame Pattie, who served as a constant source of advice and support that greatly strengthened Menzies’s political leadership. Menzies said of her prominent role that ‘No man ever had a more marvellous co-worker’.

For further information, listen to this podcast:

Margaret Fitzherbert: ‘So Many Firsts’, The History of Australia’s Liberal Women — Robert Menzies Institute